“He Knows What He’s Doing”: MSNBC Host Sheds Light on Donald Trump’s Terrifying Intentions

William FurneyNov 30, 2023

Minute Read

MSNBC host and political commentator Rachel Maddow says Donald Trump’s use of fiery language is calculated, using contentious terms to gain advantage over political rivals and to inspire voters to choose him over other candidates.

Media Coverage ‘Strategy’

It also gets Trump a lot of media coverage, continually keeping his name in the press — and in voters’ minds — when others seeking the 2024 presidential nomination for their parties might struggle to get airtime or press coverage, suggests Maddow.

Trump’s ‘Vermin’ Controversy

At a rally in New Hampshire to mark Veterans Day, the former president stoked outrage for calling his political foes “vermin” and said he would go after them should he become president again — harsh words that drew an instant backlash.

‘Root Out Vermin’

Trump said at the rally that, if he was elected president next November, he pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”

‘Language of Hitler and Mussolini’

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President Biden’s re-election campaign said of Trump’s remarks: “On a weekend when most Americans were honoring our nation’s heroes, Donald Trump parroted the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — two dictators many US veterans gave their lives fighting, in order to defeat exactly the kind of un-American ideas Trump now champions.”

Trump ‘Knows What He’s Doing’

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Maddow, speaking on MSNBC, said Trump’s use of incendiary language was deliberate, and meant to create a strong response. “He has to save the world from the fascist,” she said. “And he’s using this terminology which is overtly and obviously fascist callback language: ‘Enemy of the People’ yeah okay, but calling the internal enemy ‘vermin’ that needs to be exterminated — he knows what he’s doing.”

‘Fake News Overused’

Trump famously coined the term “fake news” to criticize media coverage he didn’t like, when he was running for president in 2016. But Maddow suggested that he has used the phrase so frequently that it has lost power and so Trump has opted for more hard-hitting language instead.

Trump’s ‘Word Repetition’

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Maddow suggested that Trump’s tactic in hitting out at his political enemies and getting people to vote for him centered on repeating the same phrases so much that they almost become meaningless.

Sowing Seeds of ‘Confusion’

Part of Trump’s strategy, said Maddow, was choosing words that have shock value and that bamboozle the media and the public so much that after a while, no one is really sure what’s going on. So, she offered as an example that “the word ‘fascist’ doesn’t mean anything anymore and we don’t have any word anymore to describe what this is that he’s trying to get us to do.”

Grasping ‘Snowflakes’

For its part, the Trump campaign has denied that the former president was using words associated with former dictators. It said: “Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

Trump’s Defense

Trump’s use of the word “vermin” was particularly aimed, say political analysts, at those he blames for his many legal problems — the Democrats. He says they alone are behind a mountain of cases he’s battling, because they want to stop him from becoming president again.

Dozens of Criminal Charges

The billionaire real estate mogul is fighting 91 criminal charges under four indictments. Two allege that he tried to overturn the result of the 2020 election that he lost to Biden, while the others relate to classified documents that Trump kept at his Florida home and hush money payments to a former adult film star to allegedly cover up an affair.

Frontrunner GOP Candidate

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Despite his many legal battles, Trump is the frontrunner in the GOP race to become the party’s nominee for the 2024 presidential election. He has around a 50-point lead in national polling over rivals including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Maddow Book

Maddow was speaking on MSNBC to promote a new book she has out — Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. It, says promotional material for the book, “charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century.”